Суть розробки, основні результати:

Research of Ukrainian linguistic world of the second half of the 17th – 18th centuries is connected with
the need to consider the structural and typological heterogeneity of the Old Ukrainian literary language.
The live vernacular speech acts there either as a live language component – one of the two, the other being
the bookish-traditional one – or as the language base. The difficulties are connected with selecting proper
Ukrainian texts from the language continuum and, secondly, with finding real characters in these texts that
would adequately reflect the Ukrainians’ everyday life and their speech. At least three epochs have been
forming the language world of a Ukrainian, and thereafter three general culture styles: early (Byzantine)
Christianity, Renaissance and Baroque. Baroque style had become the leading one in Ukraine since the end
of the 16th century. In the 17th–18th centuries it was vividly expressed in a variety of structural and functional
styles and genres, including poetry, religious legendaries, Cossack chronicles, and polemical writings. In
terms of research of a Ukrainian linguistic personality, the most illustrative are the literary texts (folklore,
poetry, comic and dramatic and prose writings), oratorical and preaching, polemical, scientific, and
business texts. Specifically, one can get an idea about the language world of peasants and residents of cities
and towns, Cossacks, Cossack Starshýnas from these texts. A textual approach to the research of the Old
Ukrainian manuscript heritage of the second half of the 17th – 18th centuries provides an opportunity for not
only reconstructing the live Ukrainian vernacular speech of the mentioned period but also for imagining the
language world of a Ukrainian both in a generalized form and in a differentiated way: by social professional,
territorial parameters.